HP "Shocked" At Oracle's Bad Behavior

Hewlett-Packard took a shot at Oracle this afternoon for its
decision to abandon the Intel Itanium processor.

HP's David Donatelli, who oversees the company's enterprise
hardware business, said, "We are shocked that Oracle would put
enterprises and governments at risk while costing them hundreds
of millions of dollars in lost productivity."

The statement seems a little overheated, as Oracle offers up to
eight years of support for its products, including those
released on Itanium.

But organizations with Oracle installations on Itanium are
eventually going to have to switch if they want a supported
solution. That kind of switch is expensive and takes years, and
data may be lost in the process.

In the meantime, Oracle may also be slower to release patches and
updates for its Itanium products.

HP is trying to point out that this kind of behavior isn't
friendly to customers.

HP also has a horse in the game, as it is the last big supporter
of Itanium.

The two companies have become heated rivals recently, as Oracle
has used its acquisition of Sun last year to go up against HP's
hardware business.
Larry Ellison has called HP's servers "slow, expensive and
]with] little or no software" and mocked HP's Superdome hardware
cluster for its speed, calling it "TurtleDome."

HP's relatively new CEO, Leo Apotheker, has shown
quite a bit of fire lately, surprising onlookers who expected
the enterprise software veteran to be boring.